


If These Sheets Were The States

by disastertown



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Coffee, M/M, phonecalls at work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 16:25:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1191933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disastertown/pseuds/disastertown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank gets a call from Gerard while he's working at Andy's CD store, saying that he's going to be late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If These Sheets Were The States

Frank woke up on the bed by the ray of sunlight slipping through the slides hung on the window pane. No matter how desperately they shut the slides so that they were so closely placed between each other so that no type of light could possibly seep through, on really sunny days, little rays would leak in, making elegant patterns on the tangled white sheets.

The tangled white sheets were now shaped in the form a ghost, suggesting a body tucked underneath it apparently still asleep since the curved hills and rivers didn’t stir a bit, remaining in their own perfect beauty. Little creaks and canyons appeared now and then, with valleys to their sides forming shadows, now much darker from the rays of light. Sometimes the complicated designs made the shadows spill everywhere, and it looked like ink spilling through the plateau, a motionless black flood on top of a white land of marble. 

Remaining his position of half-lying –half-sitting with one arm supporting underneath, Frank put his other finger inside one of the deep canyons and felt the warmth of human skin underneath it. He heard Gerard breathe in fast, like a hiccup but with too much air, and the place where Frank had touched him twitched under unconsciousness. 

The art of the sheets twitched with it, having some corners fold deeper in, and some parts crumbled together, but only for a moment before they came back to their original shapes, now a bit mortified but still resembling the same concept: an enormous valley of death, two creeks running along, two canyons, spills of shadows over the randomly wrinkled surface, and some plateaus and hilltops sparkling, reflecting the thin beams of sunlight and throwing glitter everywhere, except for the shadowy parts, of course. 

Before further admiring, Frank was forced back into lying position as Gerard wrapped his arm around his stomach pulled him back down. Frank heard the cotton in his pillow take shape as he passively fell towards the pull of gravity. Gerard’s arm tangled in sheets felt warm and heavy over his chest and he felt like he was being sucked into a black hole when Gerard pulled him towards himself. 

He felt Gerard’s chin propped on top of his head and felt it move and vibrate when he said something, which didn’t make any sense. Frank pulled himself closer towards him and Gerard lazily wrapped, or rather, dropped his leg on top of him in response. At that moment, Frank knew the world of the sheets on top of Gerard’s leg had been scattered into pieces and would probably never fold up into the exact same form again, even if he slept with Gerard a hundred more times and woke up on Saturday morning and propped up his body 30 degrees and looked at the place where Gerard’s leg would be tangled underneath. Frank curled up inside the now-formed nest and pushed his forehead onto Gerard’s chest. 

As if Gerard had read Frank’s mind about the sheets, he started to speak, which was much clearer this time.

“What were you admiring back down there?”

His croaky I-just-got-up-twenty-minutes-ago voice broke the silence of the room. But if the breaking had a sound though, it wouldn’t make that much of a loud scatter since the silence hadn’t been that long lasting enough to form that much width of a wall to break in the first place. Gerard had probably muttered stuff to Frank in his sleep until a few hours before.

“The sheets, and light and stuff,” Frank mumbled into Gerard.

Frank felt Gerard’s chin push harder onto his head and then, as if he was too lazy to continue, he felt the push stop suddenly. Frank wanted him to quit moving around, and to stay still so he could hear his heartbeat which he could now only feel, faintly beating against his buried face. 

There was a long moment of silence and as Frank wished, Gerard managed to quit moving for a couple of minutes. That was enough time for Frank to enjoy the warmth of Saturday morning Gerard in a half-unbuttoned white shirt from Friday night, drum his fingers onto Gerard’s chest to the beat of the heartbeat, and then get all hot cuddled inside someone for so long, especially with the sunlight and the sheets doing some kind of green house effect. He suddenly became conscious of the clock ticking and the fact that Gerard was in slumber again. He also became conscious of Gerard’s arms wrapped around him now, like a python binding himself around a meal before strangling. 

He tried to wriggle himself out without waking up Gerard, which was a wonderful way to start the morning; maneuvering himself through the sheets with enormous effort, making an opening at the bottom of the sheets so he could slip out. He wanted to make sure that Gerard’s arms didn’t fall down suddenly at his lost presence so he carefully arranged the tangled sheets so that his limbs could rest on top of them.

Then he carefully placed himself beside his boyfriend, on top of the sheets, and studied his face. Even through it didn’t look like it had been washed since yesterday afternoon, it was still perfect and Frank knew he could spot it inside a crowd fifty feet away, even if it might be half-covered with strains of dark-red hair. Not that Gerard would be in a crowd that often. He wasn’t the type that got quickly engaged in conversations with people he only knew little of. The only times went “social” was when it was completely essential, like unavoidable meetings at the artstore and even that was only if people we has fond of promised to go with him.  
***

“I can ask Andy to look after the store, it’s not like there are a lot of customers or anything,” Frank had called back.

“No, I’ll probably be gone by the time you reach the house,” then he hesitated, the background announcements of subway stations audible, and said, “Well, actually, it might take a bit longer, but you should stay at the store. I mean…”

At that moment Andy started to take out a CD and accidentally made the whole pile stacked on top of it topple over. He swore and tried to catch all of them using his arms and legs but one of them bounced off of one of the guitars displayed on the ground. Andy swore again and bent down to study it after hastily stacking the CDs to his side.

“Frank?” Gerard’s voice got him back to the conversation. 

“Sorry.” Andy traced his fingers over the rim. “Andy- he dropped something.”

“Oh, Andy’s there?” Gerard seemed surprised.

Andy let out a breath of relief and started re- stacking the CDs, neater this time. “Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know, you just sound like you’re alone.” 

“Yeah,” Frank sighed, “Sometimes I wish you were here, like before.” Andy looked his way in mid-stack, arms raised to a higher place on the shelves, and slightly made an amused face, like he had been listening to his friend’s conversation with his boyfriend from the very beginning. Andy’s lip ring caught one of the store’s lighting systems and shone. In a lot of ways he was very similar to Frank, lip rings, tattoos, guitars, taste in music, having nothing particular to do at the moment except to spend the time at stores, but they were also very different. Andy was in a band, working at their store as a side-thing, since it was still at an indie stage and hadn’t released quite enough songs to string into a first album but it was still gaining a lot of popularity. And Andy was tall enough to reach the top shelf, to continue with his stacking, after noticing that Frank wasn’t saying anything and just staring at his lip ring. 

Gerard made a nervous laugh. God, how Frank loved Gerard’s voice through the phone. “Well, sometimes I wish I could return to the old days.”

“Gee, it hasn’t even been three weeks,” Frank reminded him. Frank caught Andy’s faint smile he got every time he heard Frank calling his boyfriend Gee, or Gee calling him Frankie. It was weird, Andy had told Frank he was straight but he kept making those unexplainable reactions whenever Frank and Gerard did those kinds of things that only couples did. 

“I know,” Gerard sighed. “I keep thinking of the smell of the old CDs and wooden shelves and how Andy got real excited every time a new guitar arrived and drawing stuff sitting on the counter and when people come once in a while and say, ‘wow that’s neat’ or sketching at the back of the store where there’s a table and how Andy acted real awkward when you and I were too close to each other, the ring of the bell every time a customer came in, changing posters every time a new zombie movie trailer came out…” He trailed off.

“When are you coming back home after you go out again?” Frank asked after a few moments of hearing Gerard get off the subway.

“I don’t know, we’re going to reserve, well, we already reserved this restaurant near their headquarters, I think, and we’ll be discussing things we should do, how the theme of the comic should be laid out in motion-picture, meeting new people and stuff. Stuff I don’t like.”  
“Who’s going?”

“Pete, Patrick, Joe, and a whole lot of other people. I’m bad with names and faces. I’m guessing it’s just the head of the team, computer people, and a couple of the artists that took part in drawing the stuff.”

“That seems like a lot of people.”

“Yeah, and I’m probably going to be all awkward and like, mess up or something,” Gerard all of a sudden whined, confessing his emotion of panic, after having sounded quite calm throughout the whole conversation. 

“But you’re talking about the comics so you’ll have a lot of things to share and all, I guess.” Frank heard Andy singing to himself in the back room.

“I guess. I hope. We’re probably having dinner there.”

“Yeah, I know, Gee,” Frank said like it was the most obvious thing, but also jokingly as he glanced at the clock that now said five forty five.

Gerard giggled and Frank heard him trip on something. “You okay?” 

“Yeah,” said Gerard. Gerard was literally the cutest thing in the universe. Frank could literally hear him blush in front of all those people in the station. Or was he out in the open air now? Either way, there were also people on the sidewalk. 

“So,” Gerard cleared his throat the moment Frank was about to say something. “I’m probably going to be late. Maybe really late.”

“Okay,” Frank said. 

“Okay,” Gerard said and stopped, as if he was wondering if there was anything else to say. Or maybe he was just surprised and self-conscious about how quickly the conversation had ended after he had tripped. Frank couldn’t help but smile. He wondered if Gerard would be capable of talking with a whole bunch of new people and have dinner if he had trouble walking and talking on the phone with his boyfriend at the same time. But then, they were people in the art community. “I love you.”

“Love you too, Gee.” Frank said, and like every time before, he really meant it. 

Andy had stopped his gothic singing and had walked to the middle of the store and was now smiling ear to ear at the ground as he wiped the shelves with a small mop. Frank wanted to throw the phone at him, if it wasn’t for Gerard on the other side. What was so amusing?

He stared at Andy’s smile fade to a faint grin as he listened to Gerard’s silent breathing on the other side of the phone- forget all the noises surrounding him on his way to the apartment. After for what seemed like a very long time, Frank heard the flat door slide open. 

“Love you,” Gerard said, his voice now clear and intense without any murmurs of people and vehicles interfering.

“Love you,” Frank said, and hung up only after Gerard did. 

***  
Frank stared at Gerard’s face on top of the white sheets, wisps of dark crimson strands of hair falling over his eyes and cheekbones. He couldn’t believe it had already been two months after Gerard had announced that he had decided to die his hair red. A lot of things had happened after that. When new hair had grown and the red parts slowly faded, Gerard had gotten his job at the art store. Frank had been happy about it, he was getting a chance to do something that he had longed to do in the past, but what he also realized after was that his new job also meant goodbye to the shifts they enjoyed in the Andy’s CD store. Some afternoons when he was at the store he wanted to call up Gerard on the phone and ask him to come over because now that there’s only two people after three, it’s awfully quiet and it would really make an awesome day if he could just take a cab and drop by, change into his usual hoodie and jeans and act like everything was back to before the new job. He caught himself often yearning to hear the unique sound of Gerard’s slippers shuffling between the shelves or glimpses of his face that could sometimes be seen through the loosely organized CDs. So of course it gave Frank a sort of funny feeling when he saw Gerard sleeping, knowing he could be with him for the rest of the day and he didn’t have to go to the artstore and Frank didn’t have to go to the CD store without Gerard. But then, there had always been the awesome weekends and the nights on week days. Maybe Frank had just missed (and had been secretly worried about) Gerard while he was away yesterday.

Okay, he had been staring at Gerard for long enough and he had better get over his cuteness if he wanted to see him smile when he woke up to see that Frank had made him coffee. 

He quickly rolled out of bed and tiptoed out of the bedroom. The living room wasn’t messy at all. In fact it hadn’t been touched since Thursday morning when Frank had cleared up and placed all the cushions on the couch. Gerard had said to Frank before both of them left that morning that he wouldn’t want to watch television in that mess with leftover Chinese takeout and dirty shirts all over the couch and carpet. 

So it had been tidy and all yesterday, but Gerard hadn’t been there yesterday, so Frank hadn’t set a foot near the couch because he had wanted to save the unbroken charm of neatness until Gerard came back home. So he wasn’t going to penetrate into the living room now when he was out of his bed with Gerard in it because he was going to make him coffee, so he told himself to stop thinking of fantasies of him and Gerard on the couch because it was going to come really soon, probably and hopefully, after Frank made him coffee. 

When the faint smell was starting to tease the tips of his nostrils, arms slid through his sides from the back and hugged him from behind. Maybe Gerard had the ability to smell coffee a mile away. 

He turned to face him but as soon as he did, their lips met. His lips were soft and sweet. The kiss was just a moment but it felt so good to have the warmth of his body pressed against his own-to let his body feel for sure that Gerard was indeed right beside him. He felt Gerard’s lips move to his cheeks, forehead, and then peck all over his face and Frank had to stifle his escaping giggles by burying his face in Gerard’s shirt and hugging him tight. Gerard’s shirt smelled like out-of-town expensive restaurants, the type with dim lighting, impressive faint music a lot of food like spaghetti, steak, soup, wine, and papayas stuck in ice cream for desert. But he knew Gerard would have had coffee after the meal. 

It seemed like he had spent the night surrounded by delicious stuff and a lot of talkative people. He could practically hear the enthusiastic chatter, the clinks of knives and forks, the trickles of drinks being poured into glass cups. Frank breathed in through the thin shirt, and sucked at a part of the fabric. Even though it smelled wonderful, fabric was still fabric. He still felt Gerard’s lips touching the top of his head and fingers playfully curling around his hair.

“Did you miss me?” Gerard whispered. His hands slowly slipped downwards gently caressed Frank’s waist. 

Frank looked up to meet his gaze. He saw himself in Gerard’s sleepy, hazel-green eyes sparkling with lust. 

“Yes, I missed you. A lot,” he replied.

Gerard pulled Frank’s chin up for another kiss.


End file.
